Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(123)

His father leans toward him, but jerks back when Austin says, “What are you talking about?” He sits away from the fire, his back propped against the wall, a ceramic jug resting beside him. “No secrets.” His mouth hangs open and a filament of spit hangs between his lips. “No secrets, not here.”

Patrick stares into the fire and feels something combust inside him, as if his chest were a wet bale of straw with smoke billowing from it. Soon he will be ablaze.

Austin clears his throat with a cough. He is filthy, yet he neatens the wrinkles out of his sleeve now and plucks from it a hair or a pine needle. “You’re not going anywhere, you know.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Can’t risk it.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Saying it twice don’t make it true.”

“I can take my father off your hands. I can send word to your families that you’re still alive. You can trust me.”

Austin uses two hands to take a pull from the sloshing jug. Spirits likely stolen from some outbuilding or back porch. “Can’t trust nobody. The world is a sewer of lies. We’re all up to our necks in the sweet shit of it.” Here he raises his pointer finger and his voice takes on a high, halting quality, mimicking the current president. “We’re rebuilding a road—we’re bombing a compound. Lycans can live responsibly if given the chance—lycans must be choke collared and medicated and treated like the dogs that they are. All men are created equal—but lycans are not men. They are and are not of the same species, so the same rights do not apply.”

“Letting me go would be the right thing to do.”

“Your father always said you were never a good listener. This is what you need to start getting through your head: we’re in the same hole now. I didn’t invite you here. You showed up.”

Patrick can think of a hundred wrong things to say but doesn’t. For a minute the only sound is that of the fire snapping and pitch pockets popping. Ash spins upward and Patrick follows it with his gaze and sees that the skylight still glows. He could have been here an hour or a hundred hours for all he can tell.

Pablo says, “You going to hog that thing all day? Pass the jug around, show some manners.”

Austin takes another pull and rises with a double snap of his knees. He tries to hide it, but Patrick notices him stagger on his way to the fire. His clothes droop off him as if he were a hanger. The seat of his pants has been mended with a wide patch of fur and it gives him a diaperish look.

Patrick takes a quick inventory of his surroundings. His father is watching him. The black man’s chest is rising and falling with the rhythms of sleep. The M57 is tilted against the wall with no one there to guard it. Austin plops the jug into Pablo’s lap and announces he’s going to take a leak and trips twice on his way to the edge of the chasm with the bridge reaching across it. A moment later, the sound of his piss splattering into the void.

“Patrick?” his father says.

“Yeah.”

Pablo guzzles from the jug and scrunches up his face and shivers away the taste.

“You want to help?”

“Yeah?”

“Do what I’ve been telling you all along. Find Neal.”

Pablo wipes his mouth with his wrist and passes the jug to Patrick. The jug is ceramic, the size of a milk jug, a two-toned brown spotted with guano. Its mouth is as wide as his own and the odor of spoiled potatoes comes from it. He feels sickened. He feels the snow of the Republic weighing him down and he feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp’s nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole.

Patrick asks, in as calm a voice as he can muster, whether he can bum a cigarette.

Pablo fingers the pack in his pocket. “I don’t know, man. Only got a few.” Then he hands one over anyway.

Patrick burns its tip in the fire and then pinches it between his lips and sucks until the cherry brightens, taking care not to breathe in any of the smoke, knowing he will cough.

He looks at his father then, who nods and reaches down to claw his hands into the black sand. “Hey,” he says, “get a load of this,” and when Pablo looks at him curiously he flings two fistfuls into his face.

Pablo bring his hands to his eyes and Patrick grips the jug by the neck and leaps over the sitting stones and stumbles ten paces to where the M57 waits for him.

His father is dragging himself around the fire, toward Pablo, trying to get to him before it is too late. But it is too late. Pablo blearily reaches for his spear and lashes out with it, catching Patrick’s father in the face with it, then the base of his neck, then his chest, stabbing, stabbing. His father, who has seemed all this time an apparition, now bleeds and screams, terribly alive in this final moment.

But Patrick cannot stop. He can hear the footsteps pounding toward him and by the time he pulls the rifle to his shoulder, it is almost too late. Austin’s face is a rictus of startled fury, his teeth bared and already bleeding. He does not move smoothly, the transformation shuddering its way through him, as if he is succumbing to some toxin. His arms are outstretched to draw Patrick into the kind of crushing embrace that would snap his ribs and branch them through the pink pits of his lungs.